Fallen Fandango
by Toyloli
Summary: notice. Having already posted it I was advised by a friend that this fiction technically belogs on on fanfictions partner site. I am therefore closing it and moving it there.
1. Intro

INTRO

The following story was inspired by a number of different things in my head that came together after attending the Anzac day dawn service here is Aus, commemorating the fallen soldiers in past wars and particularly the thousands of soldiers lost in the single advance at Anzac cove during the second world war.

To Marybell, Yes the young girl is modelled a little off of you, particularly you're heart and good nature.

While this story takes place in a place that seams similar to Japan or perhaps china, this place does not actually exist on a map we would recognise. I have simply borrowed elements from the culture (along with a couple of others)

Similarly, the opinions of Irish are not my own, and Irish is neither irish, English or any other known nationality.

**Fallen Fandango**

"Mayday, Mayday. Repeat, blue 12 - Fandango going down. Vector one, five, niner, left engine down, I've lost my tail and am going down over enemy territory."


	2. Chapter 1

**Introduction**  
**Day 5**

Someone is shaking my shoulder. I awaken.  
As my eyes open my brain starts running through its automatic checks, just like the fighter did the day I took of on my last mission. The routine is just as thorough as a check for an aircraft but this one fails.  
Codename: Fandango Brain: ok.  
Alive: ok.  
Arm... One okay. Two... and that's when the checklist fails.  
Failure to operate on left arm. Failure to operate both legs.

Location; My eyes open and the images of my crash come flooding back to me.  
The fuselage caught fire as I descended but the plane didn't explode. The plane went through an old shed as I came down. The last thing I'd seen when the fighter finally stopped moving was her.  
I look around myself from my position propped up in bed, the stark room. Plain furnishings, so plain they aren't even painted. The entire contents of the room polished and sanded wood. The oak cupboard, the jarrah floors, even the pine wood on the doors and jarrah panelling on the walls. It was as though the entire room had been sandpapered clean.  
The window contains the only piece of decorations in the room, curtains made of light cotton. Yellow, and patterned with marybells. The pale blue flowers lighting up the room.

I wriggle in the bed; my tail had fallen asleep, pinched underneath me. Wincing, I use my good arm to try and prop myself up. My right arm is bandaged; poorly at that but it does for work not my own. Nothing here is my own, not even the clothes I wear.  
Certainly not the only other piece of furniture in the room, that accursed chair on wheels.  
It too is made of wood, all the enemies stuff is made of wood, though it is just as effective as ours. Marybell had put a cushion on the wooden chair to make it more comfortable and I try now, pulling back the covers of this bed that is also not my own. Blood starts rushing into my tail as I try again, using my hand to left first one paw off the bed, and then the next.

"Today." I tell myself, "Today I'll walk"  
I wriggle forwards. A little more. A little more, and roll over. I've done this twice since the accident, And this is no different. As soon as my feet are on the ground my legs vanish from underneath me, folding up like an accordion. I curse, and that brings her inside.

"Nya, what are you doing dog-san?" I mutter to myself under my breath and try to get up, ignoring the girl now in the room with me. Somehow she always seams to know the best ways to embarrass me. The best time to come in and see me fail again. I try to bat the girl away with my good arm but she is too fast and too small. How can a 12 year old seam to be so much stronger than me. Me, a woman in my prime - Twenty four, I was a pride amongst the recruiters; Young and vibrant.  
My tail droops between my legs and I sniff at her. Her pale skin and wide shining eyes, I hate her, every inch of her. From her tiny pointed ears and the whiskers on her cheeks to the long curvy tail that wiggles like a snake as she walks. But I can't live without her. After the crash, it was she who pulled me from my plane. Crying little words of 'Puppy-san" and " Are you alright?" - Whatever that means.  
She lives alone here. I see the photos around the house of herself and three others but here, in this place she lives alone.

The soldiers would be looking for me, yet she has taken me in. She nurses my injuries. She cares for me when my own kind would have stopped. Amongst my people I am a cripple. Unless you can hold you're own you're as good as dead. She however has not.

My name is Irish Francisco. I am. I Was, a fighter pilot in the Kaynin Special Forces in the war that's been going on for nearly 100 years. The war between cats and dogs.

A start was all I wanted in life originally. A good start. I join the air force for two years. I get myself established, earn some money and gain a few skills. Then when the tour was over I go home and fly crop dusters. Repair televisions and radios. Maybe one day have a little of pups and a home to call my own. With every day I spent in this place that seamed like a distant dream. Grudgingly I allowed Marybell to lift me into that accursed chair, with its hard wood back and its one cushion. I couldn't move it; it took two hands to do that so while I was in it I was her slave. I had to go where she pushed me, sit where I was told and only do whatever she gave me to do. It didn't help that she was so nice about it either.

Each morning like this she would wheel me over to the window, chattering away in kitese and running a wooden spoon through a wooden bowl containing the only dish she knew how to make. Rice.  
Oh she'd tried to make other dishes for me, one time trying to cook fish. That section of the house still had scorch marks on it and it was only because I tumbled out of the chair and crawled over there with the wool blanket she had given me that I was able to stop the fires consuming the house.

Imagine, making a house from wood. Wood burns. Any fool knows that, however the few metal items in the house also told me that wood was cheep. At least here it was. Today was the same. She talks constantly, not minding that I don't reply. I think she thinks of me like an imaginary friend or a favourite doll. Maybe I'm her pet; she scoops out another spoonful of rice as I look out the window. I'm miles from nowhere, the town for what it is seams to be, is spread out. Through this window I look into the back yard. There is no fence, no line. No divide between this property and the next. The next house is close enough that I can see it clearly but no the people inside it. They move across the outside of the building like children outside of a toy house. I look at them and wonder if nobody knows we are here.  
Is it just me or has the world forgotten both of us, the child and the cripple, living alone. Marybell is going 'aaah' and trying to get me to open my mouth. I look at the spoon with disgust and knock the bowl onto the ground with a growl. The annoying part is this doesn't even faze her. She chides me in kiteze 'teh teh teh' and eats the rice herself, muttering quietly.

" okay, puppy-san" she tells me, "I make more later." And simply smiles, sitting in the chair opposite me. I long to walk again. More than anything else I long to walk.


	3. Chapter 2

**Routine**  
**Day 6**

She leaves me. Never for long mind but she does. Every morning after she tries to feed me she leaves the room and allows me to sit and look out the window. Sometimes I dream of home when she does this and my tail gets the urge to wag just that little bit, turning a circle or two in the air. The young girl had dragged me here over a mile at night after finding me in that crash. I had looked up out of the smashed windows of my k47 and seen this scint of a child looking down the hill at me. I was in enemy territory so at first I thought she would hand me over to her people, call someone to take me away. It never happened. I wondered what would happen more than once when the soldiers found the plane and, I think, she wondered to. At first she would leave the radio on for me but after I threw a bowl at it she stopped doing that. I couldn't understand their chitty language anyhow.

She returns. Her name isn't really Marybell. I don't know what it is. The Law says that we aren't supposed to talk to each other, although the law said that I should probably be dead now. I watch her approach.  
For a kit she has a decent figure. Her hips sway as she walks in time with her long tail and she covers her body simply using bands of cloth. Not shaped clothes like us Kanin but with sleaves and vests but single bands. One wrapped around her body, starting just under her breasts and moving its way down around her hips. The results are form-fitting to say the least and create a make-shift dress that goes down to her knees where it is held in place by pegs - also made of wood but intricately carved. A similar piece of cloth, cut like a huge square with a hole in the middle, hangs over her top half like a shirt, covering her chest and forearms in a single piece.

This is another sample of the racial divide. In my home land clothing was important. A girl showing that much forearm or that much leg would be labelled easy. All the hounds would chase her, even at that age. The clothes she dresses me in are simpler still.  
It's a shift, although well made. A single sheet of cloth with a hole cut in the top serves as the basis of it but like our Kanin clothing it is stitched, hand worked down each side leaving enough room in the top for my arms to fit through.  
Around my waist she has placed a sash, or a belt made of cloth. I don't know what the style is called but it is clearly meant for ease of use. It hides my slight figure and pert breasts while showing off my hips, making me wish even more that I could stand, if only to look in a mirror.

Marybell is smiling at me again. I wonder sometimes if she can read my thoughts on my face. Some day children can do that, although I wonder about Kit children.  
She stands and I know what is coming, the routine. Taking the back of the seat she wheels me forwards and out of the bedroom into the main living area. And here is a confusion of wonder.

Rather than a living room and a kitchen their houses are built simply with a large living space. In the centre of the room is a large pit; this is where she cooks. Round and rimmed with stones of the kind we call pavers there is a simple iron grill over a pit of coals. In the roof of the house above it chimney, made of wood like the rest of the house it allows the smoke from the fire pit to drift upwards and out the middle of the slanted roof. Around the sides more wooden furniture, including a set of shelves containing the only metal objects in the house; cooking utensils such as Pots and pans, all of them well used and blackened from the fire and poor cleaning. While the house itself is poor this design is marvellous. Even though the girl only uses a small amount of coal the house keeps the heat from when it was lit. Large windows frame two sides of the living area, the third containing another bedroom and a bathroom. It is time to change my bandages.

Her work is slow and careful. The first two times she didn't know how to bandage things properly but she persisted, wrapping and re-wrapping it as I drifted in and out of consciousness.  
Her persistence payed off in the end as now, wheeling me into the bathing area, she attempts to prove.  
"Lets see how you're leg is doing puppy-san." She comments as she helps me out of the chair. The bathroom is sparse. There is a tub there but we never use it. The house seams to lack running water let alone hot water and so she merely sits me on a bench outside the tub. I swat her away again, knowing the procedure from the last few days, and use my good hand to untie the cloth around my middle. Marybell undoes the bandage on my other arm as I do this and helps me to lift it so that the shift of clothing can be removed.

I wince, and she purses her lips. In the crash the cockpit of my airplane had had a roof beam come through it from the shed I had impacted. A wooden stave pierced into my upper arm snapping the bone. While my Kit nurse didn't know about medicine she did know enough to split the wound and bind it tightly with cloth. I suspected though from the pain that it was starting to become infected, although she always tried to smile when she saw the colouring of the flesh. At one point she had attempted to deal with it in a primitive method by wanting to press a hot coal into the wound. I don't know where she got that treatment from but I refused to let her do it. Hopefully it won't be necessary. It would be a hard decision to make if it was.

I raised my arm and allowed her to remove the shift with a grunt, she ignored it. I was naked before her and I wondered to myself.  
I was a grown woman. Different yes, but grown. What did she see in me as she rubbed the soap through my fur, poured water over me and bathed my injuries? Indeed, compared to her small form I had much more fur, even my tail, bred from generations of German Shepard's, was covered in long thick shags. I had seen pictures of Kit girls and their small breasts, tiny figures and thin waists. I was heavier built and, in comparison to the young child before me, much more shapely. Everything from my pointed ears to the scruffy hard pads on my paws - I looked at them, then at the pads of my hands. My nails needed trimming, not that I was going to let the Kit do it.

It was cause I wasn't walking much. Even before the crash I had undervalued walking, going everywhere on my bike with my tail in the air as I felt the breeze against my face.  
I couldn't even cycle now.  
I looked away as Marybell unbandaged my arm followed by my left leg. Like my arm it had broken but not the skin. This she simply splinted so that no more damage would occur.  
Later today she would go outside and wash the strips of cloth, dutifully and carefully.  
Now, she washed me. I cannot do it myself, nor lend a hand beyond moving when she prompts me to. Her hands run over my body, mussing my fur and rubbing soap into it only to rinse it out again. The water at least is warm. Boiled over the pit in the lounge room no doubt since it comes to me in a large metal pot; it feels good in spite of myself. As though for the time when she fusses over me to clean my wounds and my body, she is washing away my past failures. At least for while the water flows. Then eventually I have to dress again in a fresh shift. I never see her wash herself but I imagine she does it at night as she is always clean.

She smells of lavender. I don't know why. I smell it on her when she cleans me, she rubs her face against my back and I cringe from her but always when she does I get the smell of lavender in my fur. Does she wear it for me? Nonsense.  
"Good puppy-san." She coos as she cleans and dresses me, tying the sash back around my waist.  
She helps me to stand and places me back in the wheelchair. How can a child so young be so strong?  
I am wheeled back into the living room. She has chores. I watch her perform them.  
First she cleans the floor. While you or I would do this with a broom she does this with cloth, two pieces. She crawls along the floor at high speed, pushing the cloth ahead of her as she pushes what little dirt there is to the sides of the room. Her tail wiggles behind her as she moves and her ears twitch, listening to the sounds around me.

One time I spoke as she did this and she tripped. She laughed and looked at me expectantly, as though hoping for me to say something but I did not know what to say. At that stage I still hated her to much. Or did I just hate the way I am. I'm note sure.  
I watch her today with a satisfaction. She works hard, picking up the dirt with the damp cloth then washing it out, working her way around the room methodically.  
I wonder if I could get Kanin children to do this.  
Nah.


	4. Chapter 3

**Outside**  
**Day 8**

We are going outside today. It took me a while to figure out that as the girl was babbling excitedly. The people in the nearby houses still do not come to visit the young girl who cares for me so she seams to have decided it's safe for me to go outside. It was a big event for her apparently and therefore for myself as well. After my morning wash she assisted me to dress in clothes more like her own, form fitting and simple. I fought with her over this, worried about how I would look. We bickered at each other in our own languages, not understanding what the other person said. Even so I could not dress myself on my own and it would have felt even more embarrassing to go outside completely naked so I was forced to consent.

As I was helped back into my chair I grumbled and huffed at the girl, providing no assistance other than to stop myself falling flat on my face? I felt like I was the child, being dressed and coddled by a girl half my size and age. I resolved myself to be difficult for the rest of the day and did not even attempt to speak to her. When she smiled at me I would look away and not meet her eyes.  
Imagine, a grown Kanin in her twenties being ordered around by a mere child. A Kit no less. No, a Kitten. For that was what they called their young. I had picked up the word yesterday when she caught me looking at a photo of her family.

Marybell is a strange child and I couldn't help but wonder again what had happened to her family. Surely if they knew I was here they would not approve of her looking after me.  
I know I wouldn't have. I frowned to myself as the child wheeled my chair onto the back veranda and was forced to shade my eyes from the light.  
It was good. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. I left like I had been a prisoner who had just been permitted to leave his cell for the first time in weeks and while the fresh air made me smile a little I tried to hide this whenever I felt Marybell's presence watching me. I could not hide the behaviour of my tail but I tried to keep it from moving too much.  
Marybell worked in the garden watering the plants. She did this slowly, using a large spoon and a wooden bucket that she had filled with water.  
I wondered that there would be water restrictions or something for her to measure the water so carefully when in my homeland they would use clay buckets instead called watering buckets to simply pour heaping amounts of water onto the plants. It seamed like hard work her way.

My paws itched to be standing again, I new it. I couldn't feel them but looking at the grounds outside the house I could tell they itched to have solid dirt beneath them.  
Part of me wanted to wheel my chair off the landing I was on and follow the arrogant little girl along as she did her chores. I wanted to show her that I wasn't incompetent and that she should be doing them differently but I would likely not get off the landing without her help. I could see from the size of the wheels that it was possible for the person in it to control it, but it would take to hands to control... If not my feet as well. For the time being I was still at her mercy if I wanted to move around.

I closed my eyes and let the sun hit my face. I listened as she returned inside for a while to continue the in doors chores.  
"Not totally a prisoner then." I thought to myself out loud. "She doesn't feel the need to watch me everywhere, not that I can go anywhere on my own"  
I chuckled to myself for the first time in days and waited for my child captor to bring me inside again. In the end I had to remind her, yelling at her through the opened door to come fetch me. That night we had rice again for dinner.  
If I ever gained use of my other arm again I would have to teach the poor girl how to cook.


End file.
